Dissent

DISSENT. In early 1954, the first issue of Dissent, a new independent socialist journal edited by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, appeared on a few select newsstands. It was not the most auspicious season for launching a new radical quarterly, and the editors expressed a suitable modesty in their initial statement of purpose. They were only too aware that “in America today there is no significant socialist movement and that, in all likelihood, no such movement will appear in the immediate future.” Dissent began with a dual purpose in mind: to reexamine the socialist tradition and to challenge the prevailing conservative tide in American political and intellectual life. Most of the journal’s founders had come out of the Trotskyist movement, with representatives of both American and European traditions among them. While they remained anti-Stalinist and (for the most part) socialist in conviction, they shared generally the view that the leading variants of Marxist orthodoxy had proven inadequate guides to understanding the crises confronted by the Left and that they were more open to mainstream American liberalism.

For all its gloomy prognoses about the likely future of socialism and suspicions among rivals on the Left, Dissent offered a combative and forward-looking political vision. In Harold Rosenberg’s 1955 article “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past,” Dissent took aim at the liberal capitulation to McCarthyism; in Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” published in 1957, Dissent anticipated the appearance of a new radical movement that could challenge the cultural as well as political status quo. The journal enthusiastically welcomed the appearance of the civil rights movement and, at least initially, the return of student activism. As circulation and influence rose, Dissent’s editors began to speak optimistically about the prospects for what they called a democratic Left: “Perhaps,” Irving Howe wrote in 1963, “we should venture a little into hypothetical ‘program-making’—what we would say if there were a significant socialist movement in the U.S.”

Trouble lay ahead. Howe and the rest of the Dissent editors and contributors often found themselves ambivalent toward US global policies and behavior, viewing events across the world much as a zero-sum game in which militant opposition to US behavior within the Global South could not be accepted without anxiety over possible advantages gained by the Soviet Union or China. This anti-Stalinism, fierce and inflexible, rankled youngsters and others drawn to the Cuban Revolution and to the increasingly militant opposition to US policies in Vietnam. In doing so, it also widened the departure from older versions of the Trotskyist Third Camp alive in the followers of Hal Draper among others, unreconciled to capitalism even in its liberal form. Although Dissent increasingly opposed the Vietnam War (calling for withdrawal of US troops only in 1970), it was reluctant to see the Left sever useful connections with the Johnson Administration and the ongoing, if stifled, Great Society programs.

The appearance of a New Left soon raised the ire of the editors and contributors. The editors, it was fair to say, had hoped to be greeted as mentors and suffered a shock at the generation gap within the Left. Their response to the direct action of the campus antiwar movement, as students peacefully occupied campus buildings, was shared by many professors but few students. Then, too, an older devotion to certain aspects of high and popular culture ran afoul of the tastes of the young and the connections of activism with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Underground Comix, marijuana and LSD. Howe later decided that he had “overreacted” in some of his disputes with the New Left: “I told myself that I was one of the few people who took the New Left seriously enough to keep arguing with it. Cold comfort.” He perhaps meant that the moment he had greatly hoped would arrive had now been bypassed.

But compared to most of the New Left publications, Dissent out-survived the 1960s and continued to serve as an important journal espousing particular views on democratic socialism and liberalism. Its editors also played important roles in the formation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973, a crucial step in creating the infrastructure of a future socialist movement. They ultimately supported the merger that created the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, including in the new, widened movement of former prominent Communists and New Leftists. The merger also eased an older problem. After expressing a certain uneasiness about the rise of feminism during the later 1960s and early 1970s, Dissent accommodated with new contributors and embraced a new attitude.

Dissent’s association with DSA brought new contributors and editors, as the magazine attacked Reaganism with much of the same fervor once used against McCarthyism. Controversies over Israel and the Palestinians, especially the invasion and occupation of Lebanon, stirred older generational differences, as did the widespread local support movements for Central American leftists, likewise Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and his runs for the presidency in 1984 and 1988. During the years before Irving Howe’s death in 1992, the magazine had entered a phase of generational reconciliation. But the First Gulf War, the Balkans conflict, the 9/11 attacks, the US invasion of Afghanistan and finally the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq offered continuing flash points. Sharp editorial divisions over the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq increased the distance between most DSAers and at least some key figures in and around the journal.

Dissent fell upon hard times, as an aging readership faded and new, digital competitors emerged on the Left. The sense of crisis eased greatly in 2009 with Michael Kazin becoming the co-editor with Michael Walzer. A former SDS member and son of a distinguished literary critic, Kazin brought new life, intellectual vitality, and financial support into Dissent, gaining formal publication arrangements with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Buoyed by the sudden growth of DSA after 2015, ambivalent but mostly supportive toward Bernie Sanders’s nomination campaigns, Dissent gained strength from the rise of a new socialist movement and attracted new contributors like Kate Aronoff, without weakening resistance to ideas and causes considered too far from coalitions around the Democratic Party. Kazin formally retired from his co-editorship in 2020, although remaining active in editorial work. He was succeeded by co-editors Natasha Lewis and Timothy Shenk. Dissent partnered with the DSA Educational Fund to organize webinars based on the various contributions to Socialism: American Style.

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Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Lee, Felicia R. “A Leftist Stalwart, Still Fighting the Fight.” New York Times. 21 February 2004.

Pells, Richard. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Dissent Magazine. Website. https://www.dissentmagazine.org